Terror Comix.(The Talk of the Town)(After 9/11: America's War on Terror (2001))

In the fall of 2004, when Ernie Colon was employed as a security guard on Long Island and feeling perturbed because, at seventy-two, he had too much idle time, he got an idea. That summer, the 9/11 Commission Report had been published and become a best-seller. Colon bought a copy and, as he read it, told himself that only a fraction of the book's buyers would do the same. Unless, that is, it could be rendered more user-friendly, which, conveniently, he was equipped to do. He called a friend in Los Angeles, Sid Jacobson, and told him what he had in mind: the 9/11 Commission Report was in the public domain; why not adapt it as a graphic nonfiction novel? "Holy shit!" Jacobson shouted into the phone.

Colon and Jacobson, who is a couple of years older, first met in the mid-fifties, when they worked for Harvey Comics, Colon as a freelance artist and Jacobson as an editor. There they collaborated on titles like "Richie Rich," "Casper the Friendly Ghost," "Little Audrey," and "Little Dot"--nice, vibrant, happy-ending stories for nice kids. Each subsequently spent many years at Marvel Comics, and Colon also did a lot of work for DC Comics. By the late nineties, though, the superheroes market had vanquished the children's market and it had become easier to make a living as a security guard than as a graphic artist.

Cue Al Qaeda. Colon and Jacobson's condensation of the 9/11 Commission Report was published in 2006 by Hill & Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. It begins with the airplane attacks, then backtracks to the roots and the evolution of terrorism, along with intelligence and security failures. A sequel of sorts, "After 9/11: America's War on Terror (2001- )," will be released in August. The other day, its creators came to the Javits Center for New York Comic Con, an annual industry exposition that they would gladly have skipped if they hadn't been invited to appear on a panel ("AMERICA: Through the Eyes of the Graphic Novel") to discuss their work.

Responding to a question about the challenges posed by each book, Jacobson said, "The 9/11 Commission Report basically told its own story. In doing the ...